AGRICULTURE
Notwithstanding its important role in the 18th-century Industrial
Revolution, (fn. 1) Shropshire was mainly an agricultural county until recent
times. From the first practice of agriculture in Neolithic times until
the later 20th century the county's population was predominantly
rural, though long before the 1960s it was a dwindling minority that earned its
livelihood or drew its rents from the profits of farming. (fn. 2) Even in the later 20th
century, when c. 44 per cent of Shropshire people lived in the two main towns of
Shrewsbury and Telford, the county's landscape remained largely rural and
agricultural. (fn. 3)
The main crises in the long history of Shropshire agriculture and rural landed
society naturally coincided with those that affected the nation. The severest crises
were those that came most suddenly, as in 1066 when the English landowning
class was largely dispossessed, in 1349 when the Black Death brought demographic
disaster and the beginnings of profound social and economic change, in 1536-40
when the monasteries were dissolved and their great landed estates confiscated, in
the 1870s when cereal prices collapsed, and c. 1910-25 when many great landlords,
to their tenants' alarm, sold off their estates. The consequences in Shropshire of
such crises, and of the secular changes that they engendered, are among the themes
treated below. Of necessity the story is not continued beyond c. 1985, a date which,
though fortuitous, is by no means an unsatisfactory point at which to break off.
In the mid 1980s, as perhaps never before, farming was subject to strong and
bewilderingly contrary political, social, and technological pressures, some explicit,
some subtle. The perspectives of the 1980s, too short to yield any confident
prediction of the resolution of those pressures, have nevertheless suggested that
some of the more important of them-themes for a future historian of agriculture-
result from a faltering of confidence in the immediate economic future of farming
and from a redefinition of relationships between agriculturists and the general
public over the exploitation and conservation of the countryside. (fn. 4)
The prosperity of British agriculture was continuously fostered by successive
governments after the Second World War, (fn. 5) and for a decade after 1973, when the
United Kingdom became a member of the European Economic Community
(E.E.C.), (fn. 6) the community's common agricultural policy (C.A.P.) seemed to promise
a continuation of that support. The farmer was supported so that he might
maximize his output. In the spring of 1984, however, the E.E.C. set limits to milk
production by introducing quotas. In Shropshire, as elsewhere, the immediate
practical effects were not dramatic: the number of registered milk producers in the
county, for example, fell from 1,382 to 1,347 in the year 1986-7 but 11 million
(2 per cent) more litres of milk were sold off Shropshire farms in 1986-7 than in
1985-6. (fn. 7) The quotas, however, were a psychological shock, and one not merely to
milk producers but to the whole farming community. (fn. 8) For the first time in a
generation some farmers were being asked to restrain production, and those who
were building the E.E.C.'s wheat mountain had reason to fear that they, like
contributors to the butter mountain, would in due course have to reverse direction.
In the western half of England dramatically increased yields from new strains of
wheat and high C.A.P. intervention prices had made winter wheat a reliable and
profitable crop to be stored in intervention warehouses (fn. 9) like those at Prees Heath.
In the 1980s, however, the C.A.P. was under attack throughout Europe and,
despite the apparent impossibility of its reform, it seemed to offer the farmer
progressively less certainty for the future as the 'single European market' planned
for 1992 drew nearer. (fn. 10) British farm incomes began to falter about the same time.
In 1982 they increased by a record 45 per cent, but at the end of 1984 they were
said to be 8 per cent below the 1982 level. In 1988 the government introduced a
'set-aside' scheme intended to reduce arable crop surpluses, and particularly the
growing of cereals on relatively marginal land. For a five-year period payments of
up to £200 a hectare were to be available to farmers who took at least 20 per cent
of their arable land out of production. Land set aside had either to be left fallow,
planted as woodland, or used for certain specified non-agricultural purposes mostly
linked with leisure and tourism. In 1988 the set-aside premiums offered were not
high enough to induce the county's farmers to take land out of production
immediately; nevertheless many farmers did register their land for possible setaside in the course of the five-year period, seeing it as a useful option in the event
of cereal prices falling. (fn. 11)
As farm incomes were checked and the value of agricultural land fell in the mid
1980s (fn. 12) farmers were coming to feel that they were increasingly under pressure
from the advocates of 'green', conservationist, or environmental policies. (fn. 13) The
use of fertilizers and weedkillers, for example, aroused particular alarm from time
to time, and in 1986 the Shropshire Association of Parish and Town Councils
called for a tightening of the regulations concerning crop spraying. (fn. 14) Large-scale
drainage schemes enhancing the value of farm land were resented by some as
unwarranted interference with the landscape at public expense and evidence of a
'cosy relationship between the Ministry of Agriculture and the water authorities to
grow crops for which there is no market'. (fn. 15) Nevertheless it was by no means true
that relations between the water authorities and the farmers were inevitably cosy:
the Severn-Trent Water Authority's Shropshire Groundwater Scheme, developed
from 1981, was at first very vigorously opposed by the county branch of the
National Farmers' Union. (fn. 16) Nor was it the case that issues raised by conservationist
policies automatically divided farmers and conservationists into opposing camps.
On the one hand there were conservationists who were unhappy with the working
of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act (fn. 17) while on the other hand there were
farmers and landowners who welcomed conservationist policies out of regard for
their land (fn. 18) and as a way of increasing their incomes or diversifying their sources
of income. (fn. 19) By 1988 Shropshire contained c. 80 sites of special scientific interest
(S.S.S.I.s) and some two dozen farmers or landowners in the county had by then
received payments or compensation ('for profits forgone') under the 1981 Act for
managing or not disrupting areas in those sites: typical payments were those for
agreed methods of woodland management, for leaving grassland unploughed or
wetlands undrained, and for relinquishing the use of pesticides and fertilizers. (fn. 20)
There were of course from time to time straightforward conflicts between
conservationists and farmers when particular sites were ploughed or drained,
perhaps because the 1981 Act was being put into effect too slowly to bring prompt
protection to many of the S.S.S.I.s. Efforts were, however, made to bring farmers
and conservationists together regularly, and by 1984 the Shropshire Farming and
Wildlife Advisory Group had been formed to that end. (fn. 21) What seemed to hold out
hope of some eventual success for such efforts was the fact that in a period
of economic uncertainty two related and increasingly urgent questions were
acknowledged to require answers from both agriculturists and conservationists:
how intensively should resources of land and water be exploited for agriculture
when too much food was being produced, and how could some proportion of those
same resources be put to profitable, non-agricultural uses? Some possible answers
were beginning to emerge in practice. Agricultural diversification (fn. 22) was one, and
there was increasing local evidence of it. (fn. 23) At the Lynches farm, Yockleton, for
example, 'Butterfly World' opened in 1984, and by 1988 (renamed 'Country
World') it attracted thousands of visitors a year not only to see butterflies but to
study old livestock and poultry breeds and areas of conserved meadow on the edge
of the working farm. (fn. 24) Flower and herb farming was being tried in more and more
places, (fn. 25) and by 1988 there was deer farming at Webscott farm near Myddle and
at Walford College of Agriculture, and milking ewes were kept at Wackley farm,
Petton; (fn. 26) Shropshire then had at least one snail farm too. (fn. 27)
Another way in which conservationist policies and the interests of agriculturists
were beginning to come together was evident from the many conversions of redundant
farm buildings for domestic or tourist accommodation. (fn. 28) Increasingly during the
1980s those concerned with conserving the countryside's architectural heritage had
been expressing concern at the loss of old farm buildings. (fn. 29) By 1988, however, many
Shropshire landowners and farmers were realizing much additional capital or income
from their surplus buildings, then at last recognized as very considerable assets. (fn. 30)
The Shropshire countryside is varied and diverse. No form of agriculture has
ever been predominant throughout the country, and in recent centuries the county's
traditions of mixed husbandry have engendered flexible responses to even the
severest crisis. There were some signs in the mid 1980s of a similar flexibility of
effort to ensure that the prosperity of farming and the manifold life of the countryside
should continue to flourish.
RELIEF AND AGRICULTURAL REGIONS
The county boundary is modern (pre-1965). Regions based on sources for following article: see especially E. J. Howell, Salop. (Land of Britain, lxvi), 246; cf. W. W. Watts, Salop.: Geog. of the Co. (Shrews. 1919), 17; W. J. Slack, 'Hist. Agric. and Enclosure in Salop.' (c. 1953), cap. i (TS. in S.R.O. 3763/19/1); S.R.O. 3763/20/4; Domesday Geog. of Midland Eng. ed. H. C. Darby and I. B. Terrett (1971), 155; T. Rowley, Salop. Landscape (1972), 23.